New Zealand to decide 'Gigatown' winner

The race is on to determine which New Zealand town will win the fastest broadband speeds in the Southern Hemisphere in Chorus’s Welcome to Gigatown competition.

“The vision for Gigatown is to create a leading digital innovation hub for New Zealand which showcases how ultrafast broadband will redefine our economy, reshape how our children learn and change how our communities live, work and play,” said Chorus General Manger Marketing and Sales Victoria Crone.

At the end of the year-long competition, ng Connect, the open innovation program founded by Alcatel-Lucent, together with Chorus, will also commit to a $200K development fund for the winning Gigatown. This fund will cover the commercialisation of new services over gigabit fibre for entrepreneurs and innovators in Gigatown, with a focus on developing new services to take to market.

To win points for their chosen town, New Zealanders will need to take to social media and champion their town’s campaign using predefined #Gigatown hashtags. Each piece of hash-tagged content will earn Gigapoints, as will each subsequent share, like, re-tweet or comment.

Gigatown is supported by a website that measures, displays and champions each town’s Gigatown content, and includes a leader board tallying the Gigapoints scored by competing towns.

Approximately 50 towns are preregistered to compete, with areas of Auckland and Wellington split into ‘towns’ within cities.

As some towns have larger populations than others, an adjustment factor will be applied to enable an even playing field for smaller communities. All the competition rules are available at www.gigatown.co.nz.

“It’s great to see how much enthusiasm there is for the potential of UFB to transform our communities and boost economic growth,” said Crone.

In September 2014, the top five towns will become Gigatown finalists and all scores will be reset to zero before the final round of competition commences. During the finals, Chorus will take a representative from the five finalist towns to Chattanooga so they can see firsthand how gigabit broadband has transformed the city, propelling it to number one in the US for economic growth potential.